Dali House

Claude Monet was riding a train in early 1883 when he first saw Giverny, population 300. Now the train is gone, having served its purpose in delivering him here.

Monet bought a spacious farmhouse and by May had moved in with his companion Alice Hosched, his two sons and her six children. The property came with a vegetable garden and a hectare of fruit trees. He rented until 1890, when he bought the place and turned it into an Eden with strictly enforced rules for the flora bunda. It saved him walking out into the surrounding countryside (although somehow his neighbours’ haystacks proved irresistible).

Monet didn’t want anything overly organised, and as long as the flowers were in rows of complementary colours they could grow any way they wanted. When he bought the neighbouring property across the railway in 1893and freaked out the villagers by widening the little brook called the Ru (a tendril of the Seine) into a pond, the water garden it eventually became was all askew and curvy.

The inspiration came from his collection of Japanese prints, and he topped it off with a bamboo grove the now-famous arched bridge, caressed by weeping willows. Monet made sure his gardener cruised around the pond every morning and scrubbed the railway soot off the lily pads. They had to be ready to have their portraits painted at any time. See the rest.

“Jamaica” George Bailey of Florida, who has a terrific Dalí tribute site, is looking for any information about this crucifixion, which I haven’t seen anywhere else on the Net. But it’s not the Dalí crucifixion that this post is about. (UPDATE: Issue resolved in embarrassing fashion. See the Dorseyland comment below.)

Somewhere … there’s a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there, somehow, someday, somewhere. I imagine it will be a large, creepy, wind-rattled mansion in the forested hills overlooking a famous city.

The fireplace illuminates a sizeable, bookcased room and a comfy old chair that’s waiting for the homeowner to finish supper elsewhere, an old man lonely but for his millions and his minions. On the walls in the flickering gloom hang masterpieces that only he will see. In his absence the paintings mull their destiny.

Who’s been in my drawers? Dalí’s as-yet-unstolen “Kneeling Figure: Decomposition” from 1951.

Salvador Dalí’s 1965 sketch “Crucifixion” is alone able to be cheerful. It owns a better fate, a better frame and, even unseen by all but one man, considerably more fame than it had before, when it hung for 40 years in a prison canteen.

Less given to mirth are Picasso’s “The Dance”, Monet’s “Marine” and Matisse’s “Garden of Luxembourg”. They were together for Carnival in Rio in February 2006, enjoying the festive spillover into the Chacara do Ceu Museum. Then four men with guns and a hand grenade, taking a moment between sambas, burst in, yanked them from the wall and stuffed them in a bag with another Dalí work, “Two Balconies”. The thieves still had time to beat up five tourists and a couple of guards before rejoining the teeming mamboing masses outside. See the rest.

I kid Degas about drugs, of course, but his photograph of Henry Lerolle with his daughters reminds me of a couple of bizarre shots I came up for one of my old newspapers while under the influence. Degas’ picture is the one below — I’ve shopped it up in the version above to goose the effect along a bit.

The Musée d’Orsay has been crowing about a series of Degas photos it recently acquired. I guess there is some glory in having the originals, even if you can buy reproductions elsewhere online for 20 euros.

At any rate, two questions:
* Who are these Lerolle people (and did they neck down strange drugs too)?
* Degas took photographs!?

Latter question first, because the answer’s right there on the Musée d’Orsay website, and the first question gets complicated because there’s some cherchez les femmes involved. See the rest.

Culture in modern Cambodia is a delicate thing, as is much else, understandably, in that shaken, bewildered coultry. Mighty Angkor itself looks like it will easily hang on for another thousand years, but it’s chipped, part swallowed once more by the jungle, and missing a lot of pieces.

Not all those pieces have been disintegrated by weapons or stolen and taken abroad. Many are in the National Museum in Phnom Penh, but when I was there in 1994 a lot of statuary was piled in dusty stacks or strewn about as though the figures were waiting for a bus that might not come.

So it’s nice that Rodin’s come along.

I say “nice”, because it’s an odd perspective on Cambodia that he created in 1906. He made 150 drawings of traditional Khmer dancers who performed in France that year, and 40 of the works are on display at the Phnom Penh museum through February 11.

It’s nice that the French have not only arranged the centenary exhibition but paid for a wing of the museum to be renovated with temperature and humidity control, a first for steamy Cambodia, so that the drawings on paper are safe. The French controlled everything but the humidity in the country for nearly a century, finally relinquishing its former colony in 1953. The renovation cost all of $200,000. See the rest.

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) lived and sculpted at 54 Rue de Montparnasse. The Romanian had been a studio assistant to Auguste Rodin but ventured far into stylisation with such breathtaking works as “Bird in Space”, which US Customs would only admit as an industrial item (a propeller, officials thought), not art. The case went to trial: It was art.

He’s buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where you can also see several statues he made for fellow artists who committed suicide, among them “The Kiss”.

Quite a character, Brancusi, mostly blue. Tsuguharu (often called Leonard) Foujita (1886-1968) was another character, but mostly red.

His first studio was at 5 Rue Delambre, initially the apartment of his wife Fernande Barrey, and from there he became an exceedingly popular artist in the 1920s, even winning the Order of Belgium and Legion of Honour. See the rest.